Google May Have Won the Waze War

Popular mapping-app Waze has been a hot commodity in the tech world recently, fetching offers from Facebook and Apple along the $1 billion range. But it appears Google won the bidding war, for a cool $1.3 billion, according to a report from Israeli media.

Popular mapping-app Waze has been a hot commodity in the tech world recently, fetching offers from Facebook and Apple along the $1 billion range. But it appears Google won the bidding war, for a cool $1.3 billion, according to a report from Israeli media.

So Waze is now in that elite billion dollar tech club with Tumblr and Instagram. (Where was Yahoo! during this billion dollar bidding? Isn't that their thing?) As our Rebecca Greenfield explained, Waze was commanding such a high price tag because of its dedicated following, data collection practices, and the crazy popularity of map apps. Waze is One-Direction popular with the American tech set, and is the go-to map app in Israel, so now Google will likely add its tech strength to make sure it reaches the top of the (app) charts here, too.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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Connor Simpson is a former staff writer for The Wire. His work has appeared in Business Insider and City Lab.